My Passport shows up on Mac but not on Windows, no way to format?

So I have a My Passport drive that I had back before my mac computer killed itself. It has pretty much every bit of information I really hold dear, and on any mac computer I can find everything on it.

Trying to use it on my girlfriend’s computer is a completely different matter. It doesn’t register that the drive even exists, though the device connected noise sounds. It doesn’t give me any option to format the drive, I don’t get any kind of error message. The closest thing this computer gets to admitting the drive exists is that in the devices and printers window it shows that a drive is there, and that the drive is “working properly”.

I tried plugging in a 1 TB WD drive that was also previously formatted for macintosh just to see if it would have a similar problem - it did not. The 1 TB drive works just fine and installed all of its drivers properly.

Someone please help, this is very frustrating.

If it was formatted for Mac Windows can’t use it unless you install some software like MacDrive http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/  Sadly the programs for Windows are all pay. Probably the best free alternative is to copy everything to a Mac then format the drive NTFS for Windows. Then install NTFS-3G  http://mac-free.com/download/NTFS-3G.html on the Mac and copy everything back to the drive and make sure it works on Windows before deleting from Mac.

Joe

Hello, how do I reformat the passport to NTFS for Windows since it’s already formatted for mac and doesn’t show up on my windows computer?

o! nevermind, I figured it out